With the increasing mobility of the population and more frequent job changes, it has become an even greater challenge maintain and track information such as names, addresses and telephone numbers of businesses and personal and business contacts. A number of contact management tools, also referred to as address books, personal information managers, record keepers, organizers, and schedulers, are currently commercially available. Examples of information that may be stored in a personal information manager include a person's name, title, company name, company address, home address, telephone and facsimile numbers, e-mail address, scheduled activities, and notes. Commercially available personal information managers include “Maximizer” from Maximizer Technologies, “Act” from Symantec Corporation, “Janna Contact” from Janna Systems Inc. of Toronto, Ontario, Canada, “Schedule+” from Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash., USA, and “Lotus Organizer” from IBM Corp. of Armonk, N.Y., USA. Personal information managers may also be a part of larger application programs, such as, for example, the Netscape web browser from Netscape Communications Corp. of Mountain View, Calif., USA and Lotus Notes from IBM Corp. The personal information manager capability in the Netscape web browser is referred to as “Address Book” and in the Lotus Notes program is referred to as “C&S” or “Calendar and Scheduler.”
A recent service provided on the Internet is the storage and maintenance of a personal information on a server, accessible via the Internet. With this system, the owner of the personal information is responsible for maintaining the information and may change the information that is viewable in the address books of other uses of the service. A number a web portals (e.g., Yahoo! of Santa Clara, Calif., and Excite Inc. of Redwood City, Calif.) have incorporated address book and calendaring features into the services provided by these portals. These web portals further offer synchronization software which provides the capability to synchronize copies of personal information stored in on PDAs, PIMs, and the remote server operated by the web portal.
These and other conventional personal information managers, however, often lack the security features to protect the personal information from unwanted access and require periodic synchronization with all intended recipients of the personal information, which can interfere with the tasks performed on the recipient's computer. This is inefficient and a source of considerable inconvenience and annoyance for the user.
It would therefore be desirable to provide systems and methods that allow a sender to control the time and frequency of transmission of updates of personal information to only those recipients selected by the sender that have not yet received such updated personal information, and to provide secure access to the personal information only for the selected recipient or recipients.